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Catherine Thompson

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Catherine Thompson is a senior editor for Talking Points Memo in New York City. She came to the site in 2013 and reported on national affairs. Previously, she worked as a research assistant to investigative reporter Wayne Barrett. She can be reached at catherine@talkingpointsmemo.com.

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Real estate mogul Donald Trump on Tuesday night retweeted an image of Republican presidential rival Jeb Bush that included a Nazi flag, committing the latest in what's becoming a long string of social media faux pas.

A "white nationalist" publisher told TPM on Tuesday that he had to confer with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach before responding to a "complete smear" of a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center about Kobach's speech to his group last month.

Dr. Ben Carson on Tuesday suggested that a rival presidential campaign had leaked information about his relationship to a medical supplement company to a conservative news outlet in order to discredit him.

The weirdest piece of "hate mail" Lee Bebout got this spring after his Arizona State University course on the "problem of whiteness" made national news was about albinos.

"It was a letter from somebody here in Phoenix — they gave me their return address — who wrote to me to tell me I should look to the plight of albinos because that’s the real problem with whiteness," the ASU professor told TPM in a phone interview last week. "And that I should understand this because black people are really mean to albinos."

Campus Reform, the conservative student news website that first suggested Bebout's course was targeting white people, was quick to take note of this latest development. In an article last week, the website zeroed in on the change in the course's title in particular.

"Bebout said he had intended to call the course 'Disrupting Whiteness,' but ultimately settled on the more innocuous-sounding 'Whiteness and Critical Race Theory,' perhaps reflecting a desire to avoid a repeat of the reaction to the previous course," the article read.

TPM called up Bebout on Wednesday to talk about why he thought the "problem of whiteness" class elicited such a strong reaction and whether all that hubbub is informing his approach to the latest version of the course. Spoiler alert: he says it's not.

"I’m hoping there’s maybe less of a headache," Bebout said of next semester's class. "But I also know as somebody who’s been a scholar in critical whiteness studies for years that when you’re talking about whiteness, people get their hackles up."

Below is a transcript of TPM's conversation with Bebout that has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus on Friday sent a letter to NBC News informing the network that their partnership for a presidential primary debate scheduled for February was suspended, citing sister network CNBC's "bad faith" handling of its own debate this week.

Priebus has threatened to sever a relationship with peacock properties twice before.